'All the Great Books (Abridged)': Great cast makes it rock

By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

One of the standard pieces of advice about putting together a rock band is to find people you enjoy being around, regardless of whether they are great musicians. An energy will emerge from the camaraderie that will tie everything together.

The same could be said for casting one of the (Abridged) plays by the ­Reduced Shakespeare Co. Lexington productions of The Complete History of America (Abridged) and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) have certainly featured some of Lexington's finer actors, but what made them work was the unified spirit of the all-in-it-together cast to convey a tremendous amount of information in as funny a way as possible.

The cast of Studio Players' production of All the Great Books (Abridged) certainly has a lot of information to convey — 86 books, to be exact. The idea of the show is that three men are teaching a remedial literature class of students who have to familiarize themselves with the tomes in an hour and 45 minutes, or they don't graduate.

The thing is, these aren't the best or best-matched teachers for this course.

■ There is Coach, played by Kody Kiser, who comes across as a stereotypical macho football coach. But he also has a love for literature, predictably War and Peace and unpredictably Little Women, which he maps out for us as if he were diagraming a play in a game, complete with references to the New York Yankees and steroids.

■ Then there's Professor Seale, played by Eric Ryan Seale, a drama teacher who does not know nearly as much about literature as he should.

■ Finally, there is Zach, played by Zach ­Hightower, a student teacher who ­probably knows as much about the books as the flunk-outs in the class. At his entrance, he says he's been reading The Lord of the Rings and marvels, ”They made a book from the movie!“

Using the drama teacher's resources, they stage a lot of the material in bits, among them a quick distillation of five Charles Dickens novels, including a ­surprising ­revelation about Scrooge and Marley, and a rendition of War and Peace that ­attempts to prove it truly encompasses all literature and concludes on the 10 millionth page or something. Seale has a ­particularly hilarious turn doing a poetry review that mixes great literary ­poetry with lyrics and titles of 1970s AM radio hits.

Seale — a veteran of the 2006 production of ­Shakespeare (Abridged) for Balagula Theatre and a similarly ­irreverent Oberon in last fall's production of Shakespeare in Hollywood at Studio — is the most comfortable and at ease in this material. He is at once thoroughly convincing as the pretentious professor and other characters such as a finger-snapping, hip-hop George Eliot.

Kiser and Hightower also are perfectly cast as the coach and the goofball. Hightower's long blonde locks fly around his face during one of several adolescent fits.

The (Abridged) format requires the players to be able to shift character and mood instantly, and director Bob Singleton has his actors gliding through those gears and even coasting through a few spots when, on opening night, an information overload made them blank out on a line or two.

The trio's best moment is an interpretation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don ­Quixote, with Seale and Kiser ­playing the title character and Sancho in Spanish, with Hightower interpreting, sometimes quite liberally.

The trio has a great rhythm, which, like a solid rock band, goes a long way toward making the show work.